2666: A Novel

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, completely unknown to me, and left behind a semi-finished work entitled 2666. What drew me to 2666 was initially the number in the title which belies much of the book. What caused me to follow through with reading it was the extremely diverse culture the Chilean born son of a truck driver/boxer that emigrated to Mexico. Also note that this isn't a book for nerds but rather a book for book nerds who may be seeking a very distinct departure from their normal reading. Like reading James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth for the first time, Bolaño's 2666 gave me the impersonation that there was something much much more to the subtext of what I was reading than I could ever hope to grasp. 2666 dragged me violently across present day literary criticisms to the entire European theater of World War II to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It was embarrassingly unknown to me that this place of convergence (Santa Teresa) in the story is in real life a place where hundreds of women and girls have actually been brutally raped and murdered since 1993 with many indications of a serial killer present.To save many of you the time of reading this entire review in my novice hand, I will first reveal that I recommend this book to no one despite my rating of five stars. One of the reasons is that this took me several months to read and at times felt like a burden or chore--a terminal weight upon my shoulders. The other reason is that this book, which is broken into five parts, is rumored to have a sixth and final part yet to be published that may tie these parts together in a more satisfactory manner. The book's title is a year in which all of these stories were supposed to converge according to all supplementary reading I've done and yet there is no evidence of this other than it being an "imaginary center" upon which everything converges. With that in mind, proceed with caution before reading this book. The plot follows an arc in time with the pacing often resembling a sine wave plotted against another (out of phase) sine wave of relevance to the story.The first part of this book revolves around four critics. They are all from different countries and they all become friends upon discovering their severe desire for a very mysterious German writer named Benno Von Archimboldi. If the name sounds absolutely absurd to you, it is a pen of a very mysterious individual of which little is known. The four critics are known for being absolutely brilliant in their literary endeavor to dissect and analyze Archimboldi's works. Norton, the English female of the four, starts a love affair with one of the three men. At times Bolaño sounds like lyrical poet describing their emotions for each other and how much they are brought together by their youth and criticism of Archimboldi. And at other times, he callously reveals a detail in one sentence--a detail that might have taken him five pages to reveal it in the same chapter. Push/Pop stacks litter this story like several stories within the story or several pages relaying a notebook found in a fireplace about a painter.The critic in the wheelchair, Morini, takes the story on a quest also to find an artist, Edwin Johns, who for his epic masterpiece he "cut off his right hand, the one he painted with, and attached it to a kind of multiple self-portrait." When Morini finds the artist, he asks him "Why did you mutilate yourself?" He answers Morini by leaning toward and whispering something in his ear. Morini seems to have caught a touch of the insanity that binds Johns to his institution where they visit him but Morini reveals later what "he thinks" was Johns' motivation for mutilation: money.Bolaño's experiences with literature and love of authors is well revealed in this section. It was at this point that I speculated Bolaño wrote this book to relay to me the sorry state of the world where friends have sex, transmit diseases and betray each other. I would soon find myself sorely mistaken and learn new horrors. As the story slowly moves from Europe to Mexico in search of the mysterious Archimboldi, the four employ the help of Amalfitano who is slightly tied to them in the plot line.Amalfitano is an interesting character--and also the second part of the book--who hangs a book entitled Testamento Geometrico because he felt at ease when he knew "that the wind could go through the book, choosing its own problems, turning and tearing out the pages." Amalfitano, like many of the characters of this book are not all there and have vivid dreams relayed by Bolaño to the reader. And Bolaño reveals yet more about himself, a respected short story author, for example: "What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."And as this text--which is wonderfully translated--weaves sentences that last sometimes as long as five pages and sometimes fewer than five words, you realize this is the work of a great master of Latin America.The third section is about Fate. Not fate as in destiny but Oscar Fate, a reporter from Chicago sent down to cover a boxing match near Santa Teresa. With the fight that Fate is covering, the book transitions from mostly non-violent story telling to almost the extreme opposite. In this description of events leading up to the fight and the fight itself, one can see the dualism in Bolaño's writing where the setup lasts well over 50 pages and the fight itself is several short sentences occupying three inches of a page. The strangest descriptions are flayed out in front of the reader only to have (what would be the juiciest part to just about any other author) last a heart beat to the reader. Maybe that's how boxing matches feel, I've never been to one. But I'll never forget the description of the Mexican arena between the opening fight (which got more of Bolaño's attention than the main event) and the match Fate was covering, a description that stuck in my head for several days: "Three thousand Mexicans up in the gallery of the arena singing the same song in unison. Fate tried to get a look at them, but the lights, focused on the ring, left the upper part of the hall in darkness. The tone, he though, was solemn and defiant, the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark. In the solemnity there was only desperation and death, but in the defiance there was a hint of corrosive humor, a humor that existed only in relation to itself and in dreams, no matter whether the dreams were long or short."Following the fight, Fate gets mixed up in some unpleasantness. Fate discovers the crimes the book centers around and wants to cover them but cannot get his boss to agree to it. This transitions the reader to the fourth, most violent and tiresome section of the book: The Part About the Crimes.The crimes are 200+ clips written sometimes very police-report-style and an occasional detail of savagely raped and murdered girls and women surrounding Santa Teresa. Laced between them are a few character developments and a gringo law enforcement officer bent on finding out who is behind them that meets his untimely demise. The strange part about these crimes is that some are perfectly plain cut and they have a confession from someone who committed the homicide. This section delves into many things including a love relationship between a psychologist and police officer that cannot amount to anything, an individual who suffers from sacrophobia by urinating in a string of churches and even a seer who can view the crimes and appears on TV while channeling them. But one of my favorite characters arises in this section of the book--Lalo Cura. Lalo enters as a hired guard to the wife of a narco (drug runner) and earns his respect by being one of the few people in the middle of everything who actually cares and can see what is going on and what is about to happen.The fifth part of the book succeeds in tying together many of the above sections as the author constantly picks up characters and discards them. We see many characters from the book resurface and tie into the story in a brilliant and satisfying way. While at times the plot of this book seemed weak or not at all present, the delivery and descriptions of this author should be noted by people across the globe. Oftentimes I reflected on the sheer task the translation of this work must have been and I praise Natasha Wimmer for her work on this epic piece of modern literature.The last thing I would like to mention about this book is that it is packed with references to classic works and culture the world over. Borrowing from The Bible, Greek & Roman Mythology, other authors and modern legends, Bolaño rises up as someone well versed in a very large realm of world culture. In the end, I felt awestruck to have read something dripping with such allusions. I also was blindingly aware that the cultural differences that separated me from this author added more to my enjoyment of this novel than I thought possible. This book left such imagery and concentrated essence of itself in a residue on my mind that I found myself thinking and rethinking about it and often stuck on a passage I had read over a few times while performing inane tasks like driving to work. This was an escape into horror so realistic about real events in history and modern life that I feel it transcends Stephen King while at the same time the two authors may share some aspects of borderline obsessive compulsive attention to detail. I sincerely regret (as with most works in foreign tongues) not being able to enjoy this in its original language.If you asked me to summarize this book into a single sentence I would first pilfer the words of a reviewer of Archimboldi from the fifth and final chapter, "I don't know, I don't know." But I am certain I would, in the end, most likely settle on the book's epigraph attributed to Charles Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."

This book is astonishing. There is more life - with all of its blood, hope, love, stench, tenderness, confusion, morality, fear, violence, sex, mystery, loneliness, and death - pulsing through these pages than any other book I can think of save, perhaps, War & Peace. It presents compelling and absolutely convincing portraits of multiple male and female characters from diverse cultures, ethnicities and generations. It covers almost an entire century in time, right up to the present, and takes place on at least three continents. The novel contains stories inside of stories inside of stories, and the result is that it seems as if half the world's population walks between the covers of this book. And Bolano illuminates many dark chambers of their individual and collective souls. Many, many passages left me staring into space in stunned silence for the quality of the language and the quality of the Truth with a "T." Characters might appear for just a few pages and then vanish from the text, but while they are present they appear as fully formed people with wants, fears and desires that seem profoundly real. I have read nothing like it.Critics will complain about the lack of plot unity (although it, like history, all does come loosely together) and story progression (as in life, the random people talking about things both frivolous and essential juxtaposed with the mindnumbing number of horrific and inexplicable homicides are all part of his point), but I suspect their criticism results from the book not meeting their preconceptions of what a book is or should be. I suspect they don't know what to make of all of these characters coming and going in a manner that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to advance the story. To those readers who have initial difficulty with the book, I would advise to stop waiting for "things to happen," stop waiting for one plot point to lead inevitably to the next. Instead, concentrate on the characters you meet along the way. Try to recognize their individual passions, fears and concerns and notice how these may or may not be like your own passions and fears and concerns, and rejoyce in our oddities. Bolano shows us we are all a riddle inside a paradox. While there are big and important themes in this book, initial pleasure is found by recognizing the awe in and of the individual characters in small and even disconnected realizations. As my mother often reminds me, the real joy of life is found in the small moments. If you only care about the big moments, life will be a disappointment. The same is true with 2666.But, as I said, there is much more beyond the small moments of this book. There are big themes and multiple layers. One (and only one) important layer to the book, and perhaps the reason some people have claimed Bolano is a writer for writers, is that the whole thing is a metaphor for an artist's relationship with his work in light of mortality, specifically Bolano's concerns about his own literary legacy in light of his impending death. I don't want to say too much about the ending of the book, which I found, like the rest of the book, to be glorious for its presentation of life's silmultaneous profundity and meaninglessness. But the ending is a perfect example of a random character, who literally enters the book on the second to last page, talking, with a distinct and convincing voice, about something (and someone else who is not in the book) that is interesting but mundane and seemingly totally irrelevant. Yet behind the voice of the character we recognize that the real speaker is Bolano wondering about his own literary legacy. As we all do, he is asking himself if he will be remembered, and if so, for what? Will it be for his masterpiece, or for some small thing in his life that he does not even recognize? After all, what will you be remembered for, and by whom? Can you say? Probably not. When the book is read with this understanding, it is never, to borrow a word from 2666, "cloying."This book comes out of the tradition of masterly works, and like the works of all the masters before, it charts an entirely new course in literature. It is silly and pointless to hold up masterpieces against one another - I treasure many books that have been written in my lifetime - but if there is a better or more important book written in the last forty years, I have not read it. Yes, 2666 has imperfections, but somehow those imperfections are like beauty marks and only add to its colossal grandeur. If ever there was a book that was meant to be unfinished (and it doesn't read like it was unfinished), this is the book, for it is a representation of the world with its unending cycles of births and deaths and all that happens between. Like the other very, very great books, this book doesn't just change what is possible in fiction; it changes our understanding of our world and of our places in it. This is less a book than a symphonic mirror held up to our humanity and our history, to what we are and what we have wrought. God help us, and God bless Roberto Bolano.